The following prior art documents are considered as being useful for an understanding of the invention.    Anjum et al., 2006) F., Turni H., Mulder P. G., van der Burg J., Brecht M. (2006) Tactile guidance of prey capture in Etruscan shrews. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 103(44): p. 16544-9.)    Dvorkin, A., Benjamini, Y. & Golani, I. (2008) Mouse cognition-related behavior in the Open-Field: emergence of places of attraction. PLoS Computational Biology 4.    Drai, D., Benjamini, Y., Golani, I. (2000) Statistical discrimination of natural modes of motion in rat exploratory behavior. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, Vol 96, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 119-131    Drai, D. & Golani, I. (2001) SEE: a tool for the visualization and analysis of rodent exploratory behavior. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 25, 409-426.    Drai, D., Kafkafi, N., Benjamini, Y., Elmer, G. & Golani, I. (2001a) Rats and mice share common ethologically relevant parameters of exploratory behavior. 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(1993) Stopping behavior: constraints on exploration in rats (Rattus norvegicus). Behavioural Brain Research 53, 21-33.    Griebel, G., Belzung, C., Misslin, R. & Vogel, E. (1993) The free-exploratory paradigm: an effective method for measuring neophobic behaviour in mice and testing potential neophobia-reducing drugs. Behav Pharmacol 4, 637-644.    Gruntman, E., Benjamini, Y., Golani, I. (2007) Coordination of steering in a free-trotting quadruped. Journal of Comparative Physiology A: Neuroethology, Sensory, Neural, and Behavioral Physiology Vol 193, Number 3    Hamers F P T., Lankhorst A J., Van Laar A N., Veldhuis W B., Gispen W H., (2001) Automated Quantitative Gait Analysis During Over ground Locomotion in the Rat: Its Application to Spinal Cord Contusion and Transection Injuries. Journal of Neurotrauma, Volume 18, Number 2.    Hen, I., Sakov, A., Kafkafi, N., Golani, I. & Benjamini, Y. (2004) The dynamics of spatial behavior: how can robust smoothing techniques help? 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Exploration is the process by which animals and humans familiarize themselves with a novel environment. The drive to explore is so fundamental that it overrides most other drives: humans enter life-threatening situations in their exploration of ever new territories on the planet and in outer space, and a dam rat placed in an unforeseen environment together with its pups, first explores the new territory extensively and only then attends to the pups.
Exploration is studied by placing a subject in an “arena”, tracking the location of the subject over a time period, and then analyzing the subject's movements in order to deduce aspects of the subject's behavior and mental state. A tracking system is typically used that allows acquisition of data of sufficiently high resolution at the level of the path (Spink et al, 2001) or at the level of the parts of the subject's body (Frischolz and Wittenberg 1997; Hamers et al., 2001). Methods for analyzing the subject's high resolution motion tracking are known that provide a description of the subject's behavior at a correspondingly high resolution (Drai and Golani 2001; Horev et al., 2006; Kafkafi et al, 2003; Gruntman et al., 2006; Drai et al., 2001; Golani et al., 1993; Yaniv and Golani, 1997)
The study of animal exploration is used to understand and test the effects of pharmacological and genetic manipulations in animal models of human diseases of the central nervous system (CNS). Rodent exploratory behavior is presently one of the standard animal models for diseases of the CNS because of the genetic similarity of the mouse to humans, and because mice demonstrate a wide spectrum of exploratory behavior profiles. The various mouse strains and preparations highlight different aspects of behavior, and many strains demonstrate maladaptive behaviors. However, mouse exploratory behavior of even an empty circular arena is extraordinarily complex. A mouse placed in a circular arena traces a long meandering path that is difficult to analyze.
Exploratory behavior has been studied in rodents in two types of arenas: mazes (Buresova and Bures, 1982; Griebel et al., 1993), and open field tests (Gershenfeld et al., 1997). While mazes are most appropriate for testing formulated hypotheses because they impose a priori constraints on the path, the paucity of such constraints in the open-field arena highlights intrinsic constraints, offering unexpected hypotheses (Dvorkin et al., 2008; Horev et al., 2007; Kafkafi et al., 2003; Kafkafi and Elmer, 2005; Golani et al., 1993; Tchernichovski et al., 1998). The open-field is one of the most common tests in the study of navigation (Solstad et al., 2008), anxiety (Lipkind et al., 2004), lesion-(Luhmann et al., 2005), drug-induced (Belzung and Griebel, 2001), and genetically-engineered, behavior (Bolivar et al., 2000), and in the behavior of animal models of psychiatric diseases (Clement et al., 2002; Ohl and Keck, 2003).
US Patent Publication No. 2007/0265816 to Elmer et al (2008) discloses a system and method for the analysis of exploratory movement to identify behavioral signatures. A test subject in a pen is allowed to explore for a period of time, after injecting it with a candidate drug or control vehicle. The test subject's movement is monitored and its locations are stored. Momentary values such as velocity, acceleration, curvature, time of occurrence, and location are computed from the location time series to obtain momentary combinations of these behavioral features, and relative frequencies of performance of these combinations are calculated. For each drug, differences between the relative frequencies in the candidate drug and control groups are tested.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,068,842 discloses a system and method for object identification and behavior characterization using video analysis. The system scores ad hoc predetermined categories of behavior (e.g., rearing, digging and grooming episodes) using features of the subject's video image (such as its silhouette). Several features of behavior are packaged into behavior patterns by a CPU that is trained by a human observer to define these patterns. The sequence of discrete behavior patterns performed by the organism throughout the session is used for making comparisons.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,269,516 discloses a system that assesses animal behavior on the basis of sensors that collect a variety of parallel physical and biological data including behavior, neurology, biochemistry and physiology, from a test subject located in its own cage, providing information on a drug's signature.
International Patent Publication WO 2005/001768 A1 (2005) discloses an automated system and method for assessing and analyzing motor or locomotor behavior or neurologic dysfunction in animal models. The system captures and scores locomotor coordination of gait, motor coordination, movement and flexion of limbs, position of abdomen, tail, limbs and paws and body posture. Analysis includes measurement on a continuous scale to assess motor behavior based on comparing motor behavior of the experimental animal with a baseline motor behavior.
In other existing tests the measured parameters rely either on performing a task, such as finding a hidden platform in a water maze (Morris, 1981) or reaching a goal in a dry maze (hypothesis driven measures), or on summarizing pooled behavior throughout the entire session while disregarding the developmental process (e.g., overall distance traveled in the session, overall time spent in the center of the arena throughout the session), for example as described in Kafkafi et al., 2005).